Steam lifting from the highways, ascending to the heavens beneath the misery of commute, fires below the pavement. I have become a better driver by the standards of Houston. I will hurt somebody if they deserve to be hurt. No, OK, no, but I’m an expert in menace. All this blinding steel and glass, we’ve…
Sometimes, after snow, you find yourself in a field of laughing gulls shaken and spat in a mass kill and your boots are the only noise. It’s like a bad joke I cannot resist telling. Enough. Hunger is plenty. Everything is dangerous. New moon, the red fox is out walking. Extinction is nothing to the…
In the beginning, I thought a great deal about death and sunlight, et cetera, cramming each syllable that I could cram into the seconds and brackets allotted me, all for the memoir that wouldn’t be written, all for the movie that wouldn’t be made. Look at the way I ran after you, arms stirring dust…
If only our children were colts, and sensible enough to be good at one thing. Running. Jumping some. Looking adorable. They would deserve our devotion. Think crepe myrtle, nudged after a brief rain. Think zealots. Think ocean waves, if we’d enough sense to give them unique personalities. Everywhere you look, willfulness. Bountiful willfulness. And these…
Jynne Dilling Martin completed her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where I teach, and although she was never my student, except in the occasional workshop, I’ve kept my eye on her. From the start her impressive gifts included a distinct voice— headlong, unprotected, usually jazzed, sometimes manic, often very funny, and always…
1. A finger is cut from a rubber glove And clamped as a tourniquet around my toe. The gouging ingrown nail is to be removed. The shots supposed to have pricked and burned The nerves diabetes has numbed never notice. The toe, as I watch, slowly turns a bluish Gray, the color of flesh on…
As John hurried to the resident locker room after doing his rounds at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, he noticed a sixtyish Korean lady in red sweats cautiously stalking him from about twenty feet away. At first, John thought the wrinkled woman might be a figment of his overworked brain, as he was always tired to the…
When Barbara Perez moved from San Antonio to Boston—a city she’d never visited—to join a new program’s first MFA class, she revealed a certain willingness to take risks. Her work radiates the same willingness, using logic twined with metaphor to explore passion’s depths. In poems like “Bottle,” mindfulness is the natural way to express feeling…
Iris wants to walk on the beach with her feet in the ocean and the sun on her face. She wants to eat greasy hamburgers and drink pints of beer and throw peanut shells on the floor. She wants to wear high heels, polish the silver, dance the tango, bake a cake, plant peonies, daydream,…
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